


Mercy

by angelfeast (miscellanium)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Animal Death, Case Fic, Gen, Hunter Claire Novak, hints of Clairestiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:08:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28242903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miscellanium/pseuds/angelfeast
Summary: It always starts this way, with something dead or dying in her arms.[some time after the events of 4.20 claire leaves pontiac and grows up on the road with a gun in the passenger seat.]





	Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> originally written in 2013. has been polished some but not updated to acknowledge any canon after s8.

It always starts this way, with something dead or dying in her arms. 

The last time Claire's father lifted her up, she was thirteen and his skin was clammy under her hands. She was too heavy for it, his thumbs pressing hard into her pectoralis majora, so he let go early. When morning came his place at the table was empty and the sun hot in her eyes.

Claire's mother stayed but was just as gone, so she left. Her father had vanished from Illinois into the West, into a rural dreamscape that didn't exist anymore, so she borrowed a neighbor's pickup with a vow that she'd bring it back when she was done. Deep in Wyoming, that vast square land of granite mountains and dry grass, was the address from the monthly envelopes her mother would leave on the table like she didn't know what to do with them.

Claire saw him once, maybe, in a town cut through by the Wind River. There weren't many people out here with skin quite her shade, and a certain line of the jaw, a darkness under the eyes—but then he reached down to pick up a child and he was someone else's father. As this man and his child walked towards their car she waved at them, caught his attention. He looked back at her like something possessed, and there it was, her answer. It was too late for him now, that was clear, but not the others. She could learn how to fight this. 

She found ways to teach herself, the information coming easy in this day and age, pulling apart texts that spoke of golden dawns to get at the knowledge beneath. There were families above and below with beasts in every one of them. Their bodies were heavy ink, crosshatched skin over woodcut bone, and some of them had human faces. The ones with a darkness under their eyes, the ones she recognized, she carried folded up in her wallet. She was familiar with the language of loss so she focused instead on the consonants of the old countries, the songs of the dead. A cut across the palm, an upswell of blood, a summoned vision: she never opened her eyes, for fear of going blind in that pure light, but afterwards felt a presence always beside her. It spoke to her in thunder, and she knew she was loved.

So she drove out of Wyoming, following the highways, carving out a protectorate with love, a gun, and above it all the voice that said only, Better luck next time. Claire made this her profession, the daily kill, and the people she saved were happy to pay for their lives. She would try to take breaks, she did, but they lasted until she opened the newspaper with its open-ended obituaries, reminders of the world without her. After years of this, though, she switched to the radio and the music stations because it was the same story in every state, the same root grief gone to rot. She woke up one morning reaching for the gun under her pillow and realized that there was nobody there, that the bed was empty except for her. She kept the truck but stopped driving.  


Now, she's twenty-five and settled, killing on a smaller scale: extermination of the everyday, and she's got the van to go with it. An email too, posted publicly for better business, and this is where it picks up.

They ask her to hunt, pick up the sawed-off shotgun again, and she says she doesn't do that any more. But this guy's website says it's your job, they write, Saving people. The website is years out of date, all plain HTML and dead links, like a forgotten high school project. She lets that e-mail go, and the next one, and the one after that, but the night is long and business these days is slow. Please, they say, Our dog's missing, our parents are out of town, and there's something in the basement.

They are a brother and sister, all ponytails and braces and the gangly grace of grade twelve. Ours isn't the only pet gone, they say, and there's also the growing strangeness, the nightly dread—Claire listens to them and hears the monster under the bed writ large, a world where they will be safe only at home.

There's the unfinished basement, with its snapping and howling, but that's nothing new: the same murky violence of a thousand television shows. Behind her the kids turn on flashlights and it's their dog, a greyhound sleek and beautiful save for its foaming breath—the jump is graceless, tendonless, and Claire only has to sidestep for it to break its neck on the fall. Even at the foot of the stairs, in this concrete darkness, there's light enough to show the deliberate cuts. The kids are unable to move, as still and silent as the round O of their flashlights, so she bends to pick up their dead dog—which isn't dead yet after all, she can feel the heart beating slow, slower now, as it slowly suffocates. By the time they pass through this room, slide open the glass doors to the common green, the pet's heart will have stopped. But it looks to Claire as though the boy and girl have already let go, and what reason is there to give them five more minutes of dead-end hope? A clean break is best.

Now to search for the beast. She'd left that genealogy of sin outside the borders of Arizona, but bad blood has a way of spreading. If it's not out there in the parking lot, under the streetlights and the heavy bellies of those old cars, she'll just have to start casting her own bullets again.

So: Claire still has the dead greyhound in her arms when they go outside.

Can you give us a minute to— The brother says, and his sister puts a hand on his arm to help him finish the sentence but he can't do it. When Claire was their age she was long used to the smell of blood, the feel of something going cold under her hand, but that's what happens when you grow up in it.

She lays their dog down on the sidewalk, and as the kids lean in she sees patches of white, red, and other colors that don't belong under parked cars. Raising her hand she says, Don't look, and they go silent.

Moving closer it becomes easier to see, in the dark, the dirtied shoe and paw. She wraps her fingers around them, touch light but firm enough to pull out whatever might be attached, if anything, and the kids are watching still—Don't look!

What comes out is a boy, alive and yanking a leash close to him like a blanket. On the leash are three cocker spaniels, one with blood on its muzzle and two with parts neatly severed; here, then, is the answer to the case of the missing dogs. Behind her Claire hears muffled cries, but she knows there are worse things to see in the world. 

Claire's the one with the gun and he needs to talk so she lets him talk. He says something about skinwalkers, which isn't how that works but this is not the time, and about building something with his own hands, something he can control.

The truth is out there, he says, quoting a television show older than he is, And the best way to find a truth is meet it halfway.

Back in Illinois, Claire would have agreed. In Arkansas, she would have shot him. Here, she's tired of sowing the next generation state by state, loss by loss. But he just shrugs and stands there like he knew he would be caught. He means to martyr himself for knowledge, she's sure, because that's the selfsame cause that carried her into adulthood.

Then—he lunges—one of his hands is contorting in what looks like a spell but there's no time to decide whether it's real or just from some sad sack website because in his other hand are garden shears, flashing large under the street lamp, and she's trying to wrestle them away—

She does what comes first to mind with what's closest: cuts off his fingers with the scissors, in twos and threes. There is blood on her face, and everybody is screaming.

When it's over the brother and sister have a look on their faces that she remembers from middle school, the blankness of a paradigm shift, so she leads them back inside and doesn't charge them anything. It's a gesture of kindness, she tells herself, that means more than saying she's sorry. Closing the door on them is easy. At this point in the story she would leave, let the locals take care of it in their way, but tonight from where she stands the boy under the streetlight looks all of thirteen. The old feeling is back, the thunder gentle and pressing in, the wind in her hair like during those long lonely windows-down nights, yet rather than the sense of being held there is the vertiginous drop of a letting go.

So she calls the cops, lets them know there's been a terrible accident. The boy's still breathing and so is his dog, the one with the blood of its kind on its tongue. Best to do the humane thing, get it over with quickly, and she does. It's an act of mercy, this ending, it really is. As the sound of sirens comes over the hills, she stands there watching the boy try to speak, try to pick up his fingers.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments are always much appreciated.


End file.
